Social Bookmarking vs. Visual Clutter

Some of our recent blog posts have ended up on the front page of Digg and del.icio.us, garnering a massive influx of traffic. Traffic spikes to webmasters are like the first taste of candy to a child — once you’ve had that taste, you want more, more, MORE!. Ahem. You get the picture.

Following this, we had some extensive discussions about whether we should add the oft-seen “Digg This” and “Post to Del.icio.us” buttons to all our blog posts. One side of the debate is that it makes it easier for people to post the content to these services, the other being that people who use these services will already have a familiar method of posting items of interest; eg: bookmarklets/favelets.

As you can see from the bottom of this post, we decided to go with the buttons. The one thing we could all agree on is that this collection of buttons would not be allowed to grow into the frequently spotted and just as frequently ridiculed mass of buttons representing every social bookmarking service in that crowded corner of the web. If you do decide you want to offer your readers 40,001 ways to bookmark your content, please, consider something like the Share This WordPress plugin rather than a blinding cluster of favicons for each site.

So now I’m handing the mic over to you, our readers. Should we have added these links? If so, are there other services you’d like to see embraced?